CAT Crucials

Education times recently conducted a counseling session on Strategies and tips to crack CAT 2010. Here students were given an opportunity to participate in a free mock GD / PI session with live video recording, where they were given tips to improvise their performance based on their performance in the GD / PI session.

You need to be more focused on your preparations for the exam than worry about external factors as technical glitches occurring during the test. The best way to balance to stress and examination pressure is to start your preparations in advance so that you have enough time to take online practice test papers. Associate yourself with an MBA entrance coaching class that provides you infrastructure conducive to acquaint yourself with successful online testing procedures

You could consider a number of world class institutions apart from the IIM such as MDI (Gurgaon), IMT (Ghaziabad), NITIE (Mumbai), S P JAIN (Mumbai), IMI (Delhi), etc. Additionally you could appear for other autonomous exams for entry to other prestigious B-schools such as the SNAP for Symbiosis, NMAT for NMINS, XAT for XLRI, etc.

GD / PI is a crucial part of the selection procedure of management entrance exams. The GD is a test of your general awareness and leadership skills. Effective delivery along with a logical expression of thoughts, that will display your leadership skills, is a must to score well in this round. You could participate in seminars and workshops on GD / PI to improve your performance.

You need to solve CAT papers of at least previous 10 years and 12–15 online papers to be able to ensure a good performance at the exam. Try and improve your strategies after completing each paper. So, focus on the quality of feedback and learning after each paper (with the help of effective faculty support) rather than on the number of papers you solve.

Develop a reading habit which will expose you to vocabulary at large. The ideal time to solve RC is five to seven minutes. Read the questions first and register important keywords before you start reading the passage. This will eliminate the need to re-read the passage. Avoid extreme options, general knowledge and personal assumptions while answering RC based questions. A thorough understanding of the basic concepts of grammar will help you understand correct structure of sentences – a large component of the verbal section.

An academically average student with clarity in fundamentals usually needs the right guidance to enhance his / her performance at the exam. Professional help will not only help you develop and utilize the appropriate strategies and short cuts to clear the examination, but also keep you updated with the changing trends of these examinations.

CAT is a two hour 15 minute test. So, allocate 40 minutes for each section. Keep the last 15 minuets for the section you are confident of scoring well in.

You need to be quick in calculating percentage and reciprocals for solving the data interpretation section. Ideally, a student needs to know all the squares from one to 50, and cubes up to 30.

Miscellaneous arithmetic:

Knowledge of basic formulae, coupled with practice of some sample questions should be adequate to score well. Remember those good old topics – percentages, interest, profit loss, speed distance, ratio-proportion, time work and the like. Well, that is just what miscellaneous arithmetic includes. Just like in the case of permutations combinations and probability, arithmetic questions usually quiz you only on first principles. Except when these questions are of the data sufficiency type, they do not try to trick you.
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